The 7 Best Mattresses in 2026, Tested by Editors

The Purple Plus mattress has a unique gel top layer, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the beloved bedding brand. The bed’s springy, adaptable GelFlex Grid provides pressure relief and a cooling effect, making it great for hot sleepers. That grid features open-air channels and columns to help shuttle heat away from your body vs. keeping them pushed up against you like you'd experience with standard memory foam. The result is a cooler feel against your body while you snooze.

"The thing I like the most about this mattress is how plush and luxurious it feels," says WH social media editor Alyssa Cruz. She praises the mattress’s "awesome combination of cushioning and response," too. The mattress tends to feel a little firm at first, but becomes more body-conforming and supportive after a few nights of sleep. "I've never slept better in my life," Cruz says.

The GelFlex Grid helps to absorb movement, so you don't have to stress about disturbing a bedmate. It's also "super easy" to set up, according to Cruz. Purple offers a 100-night trial period, giving you plenty of time to see if this is a good fit for you.

A hybrid mattress uses a mix of innersprings and memory foam, latex, or other materials to deliver the best of both worlds—support and a body-conforming feel. The Helix Midnight Luxe manages to do just that, making it a great choice for side sleepers.

"I love this mattress," says WH fitness and reviews editor Natascha Grief. "My sleep tracking revealed that I started getting about an hour more of deep sleep a night after I switched." Grief is a side sleeper and says she usually struggles to find a mattress that doesn't cause her to wake up with shoulder soreness or an achy lower back. "The best I had been able to find for solving this was a memory foam mattress, but this Helix mattress is even better," she says.

The Midnight Luxe uses five layers of foam for pressure relief and ergonomic support, along with a quilted Euro-style pillow top for a plush feel. This all helps the mattress allow for good neutral spinal alignment, and Grief says she's had less back pain as a result. "I can't recommend this mattress highly enough if you're a side sleeper," she says.

Sharing a bed with a partner is great and all, but it comes with a few key challenges: Motion transfer and the need to suit different sleep styles. The DreamCloud Ultra Hybrid does a solid job locking both areas down.

The mattress has multiple thick layers of memory foam, including innerspring coils, to help limit motion transfer. That means you won't get jostled if your partner tosses and turns in their sleep, or feel any movement when they wake up at night to pee. Motion isolation for the DreamCloud Ultra Hybrid gets top marks from WH style and reviews director Christian Gollayan, who tested it with his partner. "I barely notice when he moves, and I’m finally getting a full eight hours of sleep," Gollayan says.

Gollayan adds that he likes to sleep on his side and his partner sleeps on his back, so finding a perfect fit for both has been tricky in the past. "The DreamCloud feels soft when I first lie down, but I still feel supported through the night," he says.

This mattress also has a CloudQuilt+ cooling cover, along with phase change material—which absorbs and releases heat—and thermal gel infused into the memory foam layers to keep couples cool as they sleep. Gollayan's only gripe is that the mattress doesn't include white glove delivery, even though it's more than $2,000. "I’ve seen other mattresses, like Saatva, that include setup and removal of your old mattress," he points out. "DreamCloud offers that service, but it costs an extra $199.”

The Tempur-Adapt is a medium-firm memory foam bed that offers five layers of support to keep your spine aligned and cradle your body from head to toe. The mattress delivers a unique feel—you sink a little into the top without getting swallowed by the sleep surface, but there's enough support to keep all of your pressure points cradled while you snooze.

While many mattresses have a medium-firm feel, this is definitely medium. It works well for a side sleeper like me. In fact, this is the mattress I started sleeping on when my pain went away, and it's the one I still swear by.

The Tempur-Adapt is also cool to the touch. (You’ll feel the difference so long as you don't use a mattress cover—if you do, some of those cooling effects dissipate.) WH managing editor Laura McLaughlin also praises the feel of this mattress, which her son tested. "He does find it cooler, but the biggest advantage is the mattress supports his body so well, making him so comfortable that he rolls less, and sleeps more soundly," she says.

My only complaint—and it's minor, since I've been sleeping on this mattress for more than a year—is that the edge support isn't the best. As a result, I slide off if I sit too close to the edge when I go to put my running shoes on in the morning. It's not something I think about regularly, but it's worth pointing out.

Casper Snow is packed with features to help you get a cool night's sleep. That includes flex coils with the brand's Snow Technology, a multi-layer cooling system, and Heat Delete bands between foam layers that shuttle warmth away from your body. Couple that with a CoolTouch cover, and there's a lot happening to keep you from overheating at night.

WH deputy features editor Carina Hsieh says this passes the hot sleeper test: "The cooling tech doesn't make the bed feel outright cool-to-the-touch, but I know it works because it's the only mattress I've slept on where I don't wake up clammy." She adds that this is the "first time in years I've not felt gross waking up."

While Casper lists this mattress as a medium on the firmness scale, Hsieh says she wishes it was a little firmer. It has a base of responsive coils and three zones of memory foam to cradle your shoulders and feet while supporting your hips and back, but Hsieh says she felt a little achy while getting used to the new mattress.

Also worth noting if you sleep with a partner: The mattress has an impressive lack of motion transfer.